Cold Email – Optimization Masterclass

Instantly.ai – Cold Email Optimization Guide

This guide is meant for people that already have cold email campaigns running and are looking for ways to further improve and optimize their performance.

Knowing how to continuously improve and troubleshoot your existing cold email campaigns is what separates a cold email master from a trainee.

Finding a winning campaign is simple, but it’s not easy. It takes multiple iterations and a bunch of tests, but by following this guide and putting in the work, anyone can do it.

In this guide we will cover:

1) Confirming the basics of tech setup.

2) Optimizing sending & warmup volumes.

3) Optimizing your copy.

4) Open Tracking (and turning it off).

5) Optimizing your leads.

6) Disabling bad performers.

7) Main KPIs to optimize for.

Instantly.ai – Cold Email Optimization Masterclass

Initial Checklist

Optimizing Sending & Warmup Volumes

Lowering Your Sending Volume

Optimizing Your Copy

Testing Copies

Clean HTML & Remove Attachments

Open Tracking (and turning it off)

Optimizing Your Leads

Additional Optimization Tricks

Disabling Bad Performers

Check Your Campaigns Daily

Main Metrics/KPIs for Cold Email To Optimize for

Revenue

Positive Replies

Positive Reply Rate

Bounce Rate

Reply Rate

Open Rates

Bonus: Become A Cold Email Expert 👨‍🚀

1. Instantly Cold Email Quickstart Guide

2. Instantly Youtube Channel

3. Instantly Blog

4. Cold Email Masterclass (Facebook Group)

Initial Checklist

Before getting into more advanced optimization techniques, it is important to make sure that you have covered all the basics of tech setup and have a solid foundation to build upon.

Here’s a list of issues you want to fix before continuing with the guide:

✅ Confirm that your email accounts have been set up properly.

Not having SPF, DKIM, DMARC set up properly for your accounts. If you need help with this, check out this guide:


Instantly.ai – Technical Setup guide

✅ Confirm that your email accounts are warmed up.

If you haven’t warmed up your emails for at least 2 weeks before sending cold emails you might see lower open rates. Your own domain’s reputation and how old it is, along with the reputation of your sending accounts affect your deliverability.

✅ Confirm that your lead lists are verified.

If you don’t verify your email lists there are going to be a lot of email accounts that don’t exist and bounce, which means your open rate is lower. Bounces are overall very bad for your sending reputation, avoid them at all costs. Check out our lead mining and verifying guide HERE.

✅ Use a custom tracking domain.

Not using a custom tracking domain means you’re using the same tracking domain as other people and that won’t get you as good of a deliverability as using your own custom tracking domain.

✅ Make sure you are not on blacklists

Usually being on 1-2 blacklists is not a major concern and you should still be able to get high inbox rates. However, if your domain is listed on a bunch of different blacklists you are usually better off by considering that domain burnt and replacing it completely with a new sending domain and accounts.

You can check blacklist status on third-party services like https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx

✅ Your email’s domain not pointing to an actual website

To fix this, we recommend you to point to your main business website by adding a cname record (make sure to use SSL in this case) or by redirecting this domain to your main website.

If you need help with setting up your domains and email accounts for cold email sending then please refer to this guide:

Instantly.ai – Buying Domains & Creating Accounts (Tech Setup)

Here is a deliverability audit sheet you can copy for yourself and use it to go over each section of your cold emailing system:

Instantly Deliverability Audit (COPY & FILL THIS BEFORE OUR CALL)

Optimizing Sending & Warmup Volumes

The first thing many people think about when they start their cold email campaigns is the sending volume, and rightfully so.

Your overall sending volumes are super important and there’s quite a bit of wiggle room, so let’s go over everything.

1) We recommend sending about 50 emails per day per email account, including warm up emails.

Many of you have encountered this recommendation, but what should be the split between cold emails and warm up emails?

2) A good rule of thumb is to split cold emails and warm up emails evenly. For example, 25 cold emails and 25 warmup emails per day per email account.

An important thing to understand here is that these are recommendations and not rules set in stone, which means that there is room for optimization.

Cold emails decrease your sending reputation with things like bounces and people reporting you for spam. Instantly’s warmup system counteracts that by generating positive interactions and increasing your sending reputation.

You can visualize this like the battle between Harry Potter (warmup) and Voldemort (cold emails)

Knowing this, you can increase the weight of your cold emails compared to warmup emails if you feel like your deliverability is on point. If you feel like your deliverability is getting worse (Voldemort is winning), you should lower the amount of cold emails and increase the number of warmup emails.

Here are a couple of example scenarios:

Scenario 1 – You are sending 25 cold emails and 25 warmup emails per day per account, but you’ve started to notice your open & reply rates dropping consistently.

In this case you can try sending 15 cold emails and 35 warmup emails per day per account instead. This will allow the warmup system to bring your sending reputation back up and you should see improvements in a week or two.

You can also try being even more aggressive with this ratio, you can send 5 cold emails and 45 warmup emails per day per account or stop cold emails completely. After a week or two you can start scaling cold emails back up and monitor any change in results

Scenario 2 –  You are sending 25 cold emails and 25 warmup emails per day per account and you are very happy with your results.

In this case you can try being more aggressive with cold emails. Try bumping the ratio up to 30 cold emails and 20 warmup emails per day per account. Monitor results for a week or two and decide if this change was worth it.

If it was, you can try going even further with the cold email ratio.

To summarize, while the recommended daily limit of emails is 50 emails per day per email account, you have a lot of wiggle room to play around with the ratio of cold emails to warmup emails based on the results you are currently getting.

Lowering Your Sending Volume

Sometimes all you have to do to get better results is to lower your outgoing volume per email account per day. Even though the recommended amount of emails to send per day per account is 50, you can try lowering it and then monitor results for the next couple of weeks.

To make it super simple, you can actually limit your account specific sending volumes directly in the email account’s settings in Instantly.

This means that you do not have to go through each campaign and adjust campaign sending limits. You can just change the daily campaign limit in your email account settings and be sure that no more emails are going to be sent out.

Optimizing Your Copy

First off, if you haven’t already you should stop right here and go read our copywriting masterclass. It covers everything you need to know about cold email copywriting and gives specific examples and strategies you can use right away.

Instantly – How We Get 400+ Replies Monthly With Our Cold Email Copywriting Framework

Testing Copies

The main part of optimizing your cold email copy is testing. You should test multiple angles and find winners based on results, rather than blindly using the copies you think are the best.

Every decision you make while optimizing your cold email campaigns should be based on data and the good news is that it’s extremely easy to get data with cold emails. You just start sending and monitor results as you go.

The good news is that Instantly’s A/Z testing feature makes all this super easy.

Here’s how you can approach cold email copy testing:

1) Start out by writing at least 5 completely different copies. You can pick them from the 18 different strategies in the copywriting masterclass doc linked above.

2) Pick out a single winner from these 5 copies and write 5 different variations of that winning copy.

3) Pick out a new winner from the variations and scale up the volume with that copy.

4) Repeat the process when needed.

Clean HTML & Remove Attachments

The next thing you want to do is make sure that there is no HTML code in your cold email copy, which can negatively affect your results. There are cases where people have hidden HTML code in their email copy they don’t even know is there, because they were copy pasting text from another tool or software.

Thankfully there’s an easy way to clean out any HTML code, just highlight your entire copy and click the paintbrush icon at the bottom of the sequence editor.

The final optimization technique to try regarding your email copy is to remove any and all attachments you have in your email. This includes links, images, videos and attachments.

These are all known to significantly lower deliverability and cold email results.

Open Tracking (and turning it off)

Open rates are a good metric to track in order to understand the overall health of your cold outreach. However, this comes with a cost.

Open rates are tracked by a tracking pixel, which is an attachment in your emails and like we discussed previously, any kind of attachments lower your deliverability.

On top of that, open rates can be misleading due to privacy features of email service providers and bots that pre-scan emails before they are accessible to the person it was sent to.

This means that after you are happy with the overall health of your sending accounts, you can improve your results with just one single click and turn off open tracking completely.

I talk about open rates more in this video:
Open Rates = Fake News

You can turn open tracking off in a specific campaign’s options tab.

Optimizing Your Leads

If you haven’t already, make sure you read through our lead finding masterclass here:


Instantly Cold Email Lead Mining Masterclass by Instantly.ai

With leads you can follow a similar testing principle as we discussed in the copywriting section.

Test everything until you wind a lead source/type that works and then double down on it. The most important thing to keep in mind is that no matter where you get your leads, ALWAYS verify them before sending out any emails.

This is a mind map you can use when optimizing the leads you are using in your cold email campaigns.

Test all of these aspects until you find a combination that works best for you and your specific offer.

Additional Optimization

Disabling Bad Performers

Sometimes your overall cold email stats are looking good, but they could be a lot better if you disabled a few bad apple campaigns that are getting worse than usual results.

You can try troubleshooting why some of the campaigns are getting bad results, but we’ve seen that cutting the worst performers off can do a lot of good for your overall results.

You can then allocate more sending volume to the good performing campaigns, which will in turn generate positive interactions and increase your sending reputation which further increases your results. Like a positive snowball effect.

This brings us to the next point, daily health checkups.

Check Your Campaigns Daily

Sending further emails with bad deliverability will hurt your sending reputation even more.

This is why it’s extremely important that you stop your cold outreach (or lower it significantly) as soon as you notice signs of bad deliverability like low open rates, low reply rates, high number of bounces.

Some people launch their campaigns and completely forget about them for a few days or even weeks, which means that any issues will go unnoticed and your domains/accounts could end up ruining their sending reputation.

The best way to approach this is to assign a 30-minute slot in your calendar every day where you take your time and go through your campaigns to identify any issues with your campaigns.

When to Pause Cold Outreach Completely

If your open rates and/or warmup health score are suspiciously low or getting lower, you can try completely pausing your cold outreach (sending 0 cold emails per day) and letting warmup run on its own for a week or two, just like it would be the case with new accounts.

Then try again with a low sending volume and see if there was any improvement in metrics. You might have to let warm up run for 1-2 weeks to improve a damaged reputation.

This same strategy can be used at any point later on. If you ever suspect being stuck in spam then stop all cold outreach and let the warmup system run on its own before trying again with lower volumes.

Main Metrics/KPIs for Cold Email To Optimize for

The main cold email metrics in order of importance.

Revenue

Positive Replies

Positive Reply Rate

Bounce Rate

Reply Rate

Open Rates

Revenue


This is the most important metric. If your open rate is trash but your campaign is bringing in revenue you should never pause it.

See how to calculate and add revenue in Instantly:

The Most Important Feature We’ve Launched

How to improve:

Better targeting
Raising prices
Increasing Conversion Rate

Positive Replies


Positive reply is a lead that responds positively to your email. It’s up to you how you want to define it, either as a booked meeting or just a positive response. This is the second most important metric and you should optimize your campaigns to get more positive replies.

How to improve:

Better targeting
Better copy
Better personalisation

Improving leads to meetings ratio

Positive Reply Rate


(Positive Replies / Emails Sent) x 100 = Positive Reply Rate

Positive reply rate gives you a good overview how well your campaigns are performing and you should optimize to get your positive reply rate as high as possible.

How to improve:

Better Targeting
Better copy
Better personalisation

Bounce Rate

(Leads bounced / Leads Contacted) x 100 = Bounce rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of leads who’s email doesn’t exist. Your bounce rate should be under 2%.

How to improve:

Change lead source
Use email cleaning/verification

Reply Rate


This is mostly a vanity metric and isn’t directly correlated with success because reply rate also includes negative responses.

How to improve:

Better targeting

Better copy

Open Rates


This is more of a symptomatic KPI which you wanna check from time to time to see if your campaigns are delivering nicely.

How to improve:

Make sure tech setup is done correctly
Warming up domains longer
Pausing low open rate campaigns

All Rights Reserved © 2022. Get More Positive Replies With Instantly.ai

Watch The Optimization Video

Watch The Campaign Audit Video

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1P-Is-WLl8G3bwZqFcNu-_X03_Gw7K-AuRVZoL-e3qWE/edit

Bookmark The Audit Sheet

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1P-Is-WLl8G3bwZqFcNu-_X03_Gw7K-AuRVZoL-e3qWE/edit?gid=0#gid=0

Add Lead Values To Instantly

Backup Domains & Scaling

Buy back-up domains and create back-up email accounts

Once you have your Instantly account set up and running, a good practice is to buy back-up domains and back-up email accounts and put them into the warmup.

The reason for this is to have the option to quickly switch to warmed up fresh accounts in case anything goes wrong with the accounts active in your campaigns.

A few examples where this comes in handy:

1) If your deliverability drops, you can pause active accounts and replace them with the backup ones until warmup brings their reputation back up.

2) If you suspect your accounts got burnt, you can quickly switch them out without losing valuable time.

3) If you wish to scale up you already have accounts ready and can scale without having to wait until warmup is finished and the accounts are ready.

Once you start getting positive replies, scale up

The good thing about cold emailing is that you can scale it up with minimal costs and risks, so once your campaigns are showing promise and you are getting positive replies, the smartest thing to do is to scale up your volume by getting new domains and email accounts.

Like mentioned above, if you already have them ready you can do this quickly.

Deliverability Optimization Mindmap

https://www.mindmeister.com/app/map/2668393269?t=XHGICdq3G9